Major Slice of Larchmont History for Sale: The Manor House

by Judy Silberstein

photo courtesy of Julia B. Fee Realty

(October 24, 2005) Larchmont’s most historic home is on the market: the next purchaser of the Manor House at 18 Elm Avenue will be inhabiting a home whose history stretches back to the 1790's when it was first built as a country house for Peter Jay Munro, a nephew of the first Chief Justice of the United States.

Today, the house is at the historical and geographic center of Larchmont itself. It’s a few blocks from Village Hall and lies at the head of Prospect Avenue, which rolls down through the heart of Larchmont Manor to Fountain Square and Manor Park. The estate’s landholdings eventually became the Larchmont Manor a hundred years later. The property’s first larch trees, planted to isolate the home from the busy Boston Post Road on which it originally fronted, inspired the village’s name.

The grand staircase (left) may have originally faced the other way, when the house fronted towards the Post Road rather than Elm Avenue. An upstairs window overlooks the yard with antique trees, including a 300-year-old black walnut.

Big names in Larchmont’s founding are associated with the home: in gathering parcels of land for his country estate, Peter Jay Munro dealt with Samuel Palmer and his heirs. The first president of the Larchmont Manor Company, R.J.S. Flint, bought the house with 288 acres of land in 1865. Charles H. Murray became head of the company in 1882, turning the house into a hotel, dubbed the “Manor House.”

Throughout the years, the house served as a country estate, a resort, and briefly the Manor School for Girls around 1902. For the past 50 years, though, it has been a family home and, since 1982, the home of Dr. Carl Olsson, until recently chairman of urology at Columbia Presbyterian, and his wife Mary Olsson, a nurse and bassoonist.

Dr. Olsson had barely stepped into the front hall in 1982 when he made up his mind to buy the house.

“It was the grandeur – it was a grand, grand place,” said Dr. Olsson, explaining his snap decision. “And it had plenty of goodies,” he said, such as the moldings, the 12-foot ceilings (“you can imagine a Christmas tree”), and the eight fireplaces, including one for each of the 4 bedrooms on the second floor. The grounds, now covering 1.44 acres, still contain antique specimen trees, including three towering larches and an immense black walnut that bears buckets of fist-sized fruit and is estimated to be at least 300 years old.

The built-in shutters and original hardware had been hidden by layers of paint. The dining room fireplace is only one of 8, originally used to heat the house.

During renovations, more “goodies” were revealed. Under layers and layers of paint, the Olsson’s found built-in shutters with their original hardware intact and doorknobs of Sheffield silver-plate downstairs and porcelain with gold-detailing upstairs. However, according to Mary Olsson, “though many children have dug holes in the cellar, we never found the rumored "Underground Railway” tunnel, which some believe ran from the Quaker Cemetery, on the north side of the Boston Post Road, through to some part of the Munro estate.

Working fireplaces in each second-floor bedroom have different color schemes. Removing centuries of paint revealed porcelain door knobs with gilded details.

“We’ve basically spent our 20 years here trying to keep the integrity of everything we found that was original,” said Mary Olsson. But it’s been the Olsson’s home – not a museum - so not every improvement would pass historical muster.

And of course the house had already undergone myriad changes over the years to winterize, modernize, and adapt to the decades and centuries. For example, Peter Jay Munro designed his home facing the Boston Post Road, but sometime in the 1850's, under the ownership of Edward Knight Collins, the house received a new decorative two-story veranda on the Elm Avenue side facing the water, and that became the main entrance. While the original chestnut roof beams can still be seen in the attic, the wood floors, including some with intricate parquetry, are of various vintages.

Nevertheless, according to Barbara Newman, the current president of the Larchmont Historical Society, each owner of the Manor House bears an awesome responsibility "to preserve Larchmont's crown jewel." She explained, "If you view it from an historical perspective, the selling of Manor House is really a 'passing of the torch' from one proprietor to the next. There is a tacit understanding that each new owner is merely the next in a line of custodians for this local treasure."

Whoever acquires the "local treasure" at 18 Elm Avenue, will be purchasing along with a slice of history, 1.44 acres of land, 6820 estimated square feet of house; 7 bedrooms, 4.2 baths and all those silver doorknobs. This doesn’t come cheap: the asking price is $6,250,000. (For more information, contact Cini Palmer at Julia B. Fee, 834-0270. )

In the 1850's the house acquired double porches on the Elm Avenue side, which became the front. An enormous larch, which helped give Larchmont its name, towers over the three-story home.

Many thanks to Judy Doolin Spikes, historian for the Village of Larchmont and author of many books and articlesLarchmont's history, and to the Larchmont Historical Society for providing information for this article.

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